ABSTRACT
Cultural psychology seeks to reinstate the thinking, feeling person into the center of psychology by focusing upon the meaningful organization and development of human action within social, societal, and historical contexts. Language is the primary substrate within which humans build semiotic regulators, although humans are capable of finding, producing, and struggling for meaning in any medium. As psychology moved more completely into the twentieth century, the study of thinking fell victim to a pair of unlikely coconspirators. Autodialogue is the heart of the process of semiotic regulation because it is where new creations establish their range of applicability and level of generalization. Karl Buhler’s studies of thinking focused upon how his participants went about understanding complex tasks and sayings and the reports of the first-hand experience of the effort at understanding as the primary form of data for the psychology of thinking.
